Creating Billing Accounts

Cost is the primary concern when moving to the cloud. GCP provides multiple ways through which you can manage the cost of your infrastructure. One of these is to have separate billing accounts for each of your dev and production projects and setting up budgets in the dev environment.

There is one more reason to use multiple billing accounts in GCP. Different departments in an organization can have separate billing accounts so that they can manage their budgets according to their policies.

Let’s create one more billing account. The steps to create billing accounts are the same. However, you can choose to use a different credit card for this billing account.

Creating billing account#

The Billing Administrator role is required to create a new billing account.

1. Open Main menu> Billing

2. Click on the Billing account dropdown list and click on the MANAGE BILLING ACCOUNT.

3. Click on the CREATE ACCOUNT button to create a new billing account.

4. Name the billing account and click on the CONTINUE button.

5. You can choose an existing payment profile or create a new one. Let’s select the existing one. If you click to create a new profile the steps will be the same.

6. Fill in other details such as tax information and continue.

7. Once you click on the submit button to enable billing you will be asked to verify the credit card information. Verify it so that the second billing account will be activated.

   Once done you will have a new billing account in the billing dashboard.

Types of billing accounts#

There are two types of billing accounts.

1. Self-serve
2. Invoiced

Self Serve	Invoiced
Billing Threshold or 30 Days	Monthly Invoice
Credit/Debit card	Cheque/Transfer payment

For self-serve accounts, billing is mostly monthly or after reaching a certain threshold. For invoiced accounts, the invoices are sent monthly and payment can be done via cheque or wire transfer. However, for the invoiced account, one needs to contact the Google Cloud sales team.

We can check the type of account in the “Payment settings” > “How you pay” option.

If there is only one billing account, all the projects are, by default, attached to the same billing account. Attaching all projects to a single billing account is not a good practice if you have a larger organization. The different billing accounts can be used to attach different projects according to the department and their budget.

So, the next step is to learn how to attach projects to the newly created billing account.